"The people I've talked to so far, they've all said, 'This is just wind and rain, we've seen this before. [Hurricane] Ike was bad, this is nothing.' "

Martin says people in Houston are still recovering from flooding three weeks ago.

"That was pretty bad in parts of Houston," he says. "People are still in the process of fixing their houses. There's been a lot of damage; FEMA has been helping out with federal money. We're all hoping down here it won't get too bad in the Houston area. At this point at least it seems like it's not as bad as we expected."

The Washington Post noted: "The tropical disturbance in the Gulf has been very slow to organize into a fully-formed tropical cyclone, though the lack of an impressive appearance on satellite does not diminish the flooding threat."

The Post says the storm system is expected to bring rain to Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York and the Washington, D.C., area later this week. It adds:

"In terms of climatology, June is actually not an uncommon month for tropical cyclone landfalls on and near the Texas coast. Since 1851, there have been 26 landfalls, from tropical depressions up to a category 4 hurricane."

"While tropical storms usually gather power from the warm waters of the ocean and then weaken once they move over land, NASA-funded research has shown some storms can actually strengthen over land by drawing from the evaporation of abundant soil moisture, Shepherd said. The phenomenon is known as the 'brown ocean' effect."

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